Archive for August 23rd, 2010

HP confirms webOS tablet hitting in early 2011 Inbox X

Despite all the hubbub about CEO Mark Hurd, Hewlett-Packard posted great earnings for its quarter and the company confirmed that it will soon have multiple tablets to compete with the Apple iPad.

The company said the Apple iPad may have hurt the sales of some of its laptops but it said a Windows tablet will be coming soon, maybe even as soon as the next few weeks. This device will likely be based on Windows 7 and should target the enterprise market with corporate-friendly features like video conferencing and integration with back-end business databases.

What really gets me excited is that HP also confirmed it will bring out a webOS tablet in early 2011 and this will be a mass-market device. HP spent $1.2 billion to acquire Palm earlier this year and it plans to “double down” on the webOS platform by putting it in a variety of devices like smartphones, tablets and even printers.

I’m a fan of webOS because I think it’s an elegant and beautiful smartphone OS – in fact, it’s probably the best 1.0 version I’ve ever seen. The Palm hardware didn’t do it justice and I think the “cards” user interface metaphor would work extremely well on a big tablet.

Let’s hope the HP webOS tablet has at least a 1 GHz processor, WiFi, GPS, multiple cameras and a few USB ports. I could see 3G being useful but I think tablets will mainly use WiFi connections.

An HP webOS tablet couldn’t come soon enough, as the Apple iPad is gaining some serious momentum – it has sold more than three million units in a few months. We may even see a revamped Apple iPad in time for the holidays.

It’s not just Apple HP has to worry about, as we’re about to see a slew of tablets from companies like Samsung, Research In Motion, Asus, Toshiba and others. We’ve put together a list of the five most-anticipated tablets and you should check it out.

[Via VentureBeat]

Thanks Kevin

webOS 2.0 and mystery Roadrunner HD device spotted in app logs Inbox X

That mystery webOS 2.0 device with the codename Roadrunner has been spotted for a second time within the usage stats of another webOS application. Last week, the app logs of a Foursquare app for webOS coughed up a single reference to webOS 2.0 and identified a mystery device with a codename of Roadrunner. This week a second app produced yet another reference to webOS and fingered a second device with the codename Roadrunner HD.

This second and exciting reference is from a gaming app titled Cloud Hopper and adds “HD” to the end of the Roadrunner moniker. Similar to the original leak, this information was gleaned from the usage data provided by Metrix, an analytics package for webOS developers. The Metrix data in this second leak suggests that the Roadrunner HD device sports a 640×960 resolution, which is nice a jump from the 320×480 of the original Roadrunner leak.

Adding some credibility to this rumor is the fact that Cloud Hopper is closed source, making it difficult to spoof the webOS 2.0 and Roadrunner HD user agent strings. The usual warning to take this rumor with a grain of salt applies as we can not verify the authenticity of these claims. Nonetheless, we can’t help but ponder the thought of a high-end webOS smartphone or a smaller-size tablet out in the wild. It is a tantalizing idea, no?

[Via PreCentral and Twitter]

Thanks Kevin